By Paul
Onomuakpokpo
It is not unusual for
the fierceness of the support for the administration of President Muhammadu
Buhari and his All Progressives Party (APC) to find expression in the riposte
that the citizens must not expect an automatic realisation of the
change the party and its helmsman promised. Their expectations have often been
scaled down with the reprimand that if it took the last administration 16
years to liquidate all props for corporate probity and sanity, it smacks
of sheer perfidy on the part of the citizens to ask the president and
his party to rebuild the nation in just one year.
But this position has
turned out as a self-fulfilling prophecy since the Buhari administration is
pathetically denuded of the hallmarks of stellar performance as it
marks one year on Sunday. No doubt, the promise to fight corruption
was irresistible. Let’s get all the money stolen from the national treasury and
deploy it in the development of electricity, roads and other
infrastructure. No one really opposed fighting corruption. Indeed,
the citizens thought that fighting corruption was a grand idea and that once
this was resolved, the nation would sally forth towards its destined path of
greatness.
But a year after, the
fight against corruption has been reduced to a part of the nation’s cocktail of
chimeras. Forget about the arrests and their razzmatazz of
media trials. The question the citizens are asking now is, how effective has
the anti-corruption campaign been in the past one year? This is simply because
the Buhari administration’s prosecution of the anti-corruption
campaign has been divorced from the rigorous
imagination that would have earned it more credibility. It is
convenient for the Buhari administration to engender an environment in
which the focus is only on the members of the opposition whom the anti-graft
agencies arrest and ask to refund the money they have stolen. But the
inconvenient and a much more credible way to prosecute the
anti-corruption campaign on the back of audacious imagination would have been
to extend it to both foes and friends. Now, it is the people who ought to be among
those being tried who are dictating the terms of the anti-corruption
regime. Let’s strip the argument that we should start from somewhere
and use some people as scapegoats of all its sophistry. As long as the
anti-corruption campaign has not caught up with all former leaders who made
their billions simply on account of occupying public offices, and as long as it
is only targeted at the members of the opposition and critics of the policies
of the Buhari administration, we cannot regard it as one of the achievements of
the past year.
Again, there is the
need to worry about the anti-corruption campaign as it has not by any means
improved the lot of the citizens. If the billions are being recovered as we
have often been told, why have they not been invested in the economy to revamp
it? Rather, the stark reality today is that the citizens who are outside
government are stuck with an economic fate that is far bleaker than it was
before the Buhari administration. Those who had the hope of getting employment
during the administration of Buhari have been disillusioned. Worse
still, thousands of others have been thrown into unemployment. Their
woes have been worsened by failed electricity and the scarcity
of fuel that made them to spend a significant part of their
time in the last one year trekking in search of fuel.
Apparently taking their
cue from the notion that in this administration the life of the average citizen
is not worth anything, contrary to all platitudes, the wanton killings of
the citizens by security operatives have not been uncommon occurrences in the
past one year. The famed discipline of Buhari has not percolated through
the various security agencies. In fact, it seems that with Buhari being in Aso
Rock, the security operatives have been given a licence for impunity. This is
why they remorselessly invaded government houses as in Akwa Ibom State . In Ekiti
State , security operatives arrested
state officials and took them to Abuja
in a bid to corral to them to impeach Ayo Fayose who has become a virulent
critic of the Buhari administration. Impunity is stretched further by the
Buhari government not releasing those legitimate courts have granted bail.
They must all be incarcerated to suit Buhari’s sense of justice.
Buhari emerged as
president because there was a relatively fair and stable electoral system. But
in the past one year, the Buhari administration has tended to erode those
electoral gains before his emergence. From Kogi State
to Bayelsa, elections have been marred by inconclusiveness. The nation’s
electoral system has been threatened with willful cancellations.
Buhari has been on the
cusp of successfully bringing the fight against Boko Haram to a close. But this
appears to be offering only a temporary respite as he has failed to effectively
address the issues that are the breeding grounds for the religious fanaticism
that gave birth to Boko Haram. Beyond the often linkage of religion and
terrorism, we must take cognisance of the fact that if the society
galvanised the opportunities for education and employment for the
youths to be creatively engaged, they would not be available
for brainwashing and killing of other citizens. It is because such
opportunities are lacking that militancy also festers in the Niger Delta.
It is the same reason that has given birth to the agitators under the aegis of
the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB). The Buhari government has glossed
over the need for an equitable federal system that would ensure that
opportunities are not available to only those who have access to power at the
federal level. Such opportunities are what would erase the impression that one
part of the country is favoured more than another. There should be equal
opportunities that would give all the stakeholders in the country a sense of
belonging.
It is easy for the
Buhari government to think that it is doing well since there is no longer a
vibrant opposition that would brand it clueless as it was the lot of its
predecessor . Yet, it should cover up the lost ground of the past year by
responding to national issues with a sense of urgency that they require. But if
Buhari and his APC do not appreciate this urgency, they may stick to their
notion that to rebuild what has taken 16 years to destroy, they would
need an equal number of years. Then though the citizens are groaning under
so much economic hardship, they have to wait for 16 years for their fortunes to
change. The APC would keep making promises of creating jobs, of succouring the
vulnerable in the society notwithstanding that the citizens have no
assurance that these promises would not be broken like the previous ones.
But there are now only two options open to Buhari and his party: seize the
moment and leave behind enduring legacies or finally squander the already
diminishing goodwill of the citizens they have on the altar of
dereliction and smug omniscience.
* Dr. Onomuakpokpo is
on the Editorial Board of The Guardian
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